Jack Higgins – In the Hour Before Midnight

When you jump at eight hundred feet, it takes exactly thirty seconds to hit the deck which doesn’t give you long to sort yourself out. That close to the rock face there were down-draughts and I started to oscillate. As usual, once you were out in the open, the light didn’t seem anything like as good. I caught a brief glimpse of one chute then another like dark thistle-down, drifting into the shadows beside the waterfall and then I was moving in fast myself.

The trouble with a night-drop is that usually you can’t see the ground which accounts for the high pro-portion of broken limbs on that type of operation, people being caught by surprise and landing too stiffly.

That was one thing I liked about the supply bag dangling down there at the end of a twenty foot line. Unless you are oscillating alarmingly, the bag hits the deck first with a solid thump, warning you to get ready.

I just made it in time. The supply bag thudded into the ground and I followed a split second later, rolling into a patch of surprisingly springy turf. I rolled again and came to rest, a shoulder of rock nudging me in the ribs.

I lay there, winded, and someone came close and leaned over me. There was the gleam of steel and I got

my hand up just in time, the Smith and Wesson ready.

‘I was only going to cut your line,’ Piet Jaeger said.

‘Are you sure it wasn’t my throat you were aiming for?’

‘Another time,’ he said. ‘When you aren’t so useful. When we don’t need you any more.’

He sounded as if he meant it and sliced through my belt line and pulled my supply bag clear. I struggled out of my harness and got rid of the chute. Now that I was down, the light seemed much better and I could see Burke and Legrande approaching carrying their chutes and supply bags. The Frenchman was limping, but it turned out to be nothing serious. In his case, his oscillation had been so great that he had hit the ground before his supply bag when unprepared. He’d obviously had a bad snaking, but he made light of it as we unpacked.

The supply bags held the commando rucksacks con-taining food and water, our weapons and extra am-munition, and when they were empty, went into a con-venient crevasse together witih the parachutes.

We squatted in the shelter of the rocks and Burke passed round a flask of brandy. I took a long pull and found myself smiling, grateful to be alive, two feet on solid earth again as the warmth spread through me.

‘There’s no point in hanging about,’ he said. ‘Straight up to the top from here. We’ve got to get over and into those trees while it’s still dark.’

Which didn’t give us long because dawn was officially at ten past four and we moved out at once in single file. I took the lead because, in theory at least, I knew more about the terrain than anyone else and fol-lowed a route which took us straight up the side of the waterfall.

It was a marvellous night, the moon almost full, a tracer or two of cloud aroused, stars glittering every-where. The mountains marched into the distance, ridge after ridge of them, and far to the east moonlight glit-tered on Etna’s snowy peak.

The valleys were dark, but four thousand feet below and a couple of miles to the right in the general direc-tion of Bellona, a single light gleamed. I wondered if it could be Cerda sitting up and wondering how we were making out, for nothing was more certain than that my grandfather would have kept him fully informed.

A good actor, Cerda, one had to admit that. Even the gun behind his back had all been part of the show. He had behaved in a way it was reasonable to suppose I would expect him to-very clever. His one flaw had been his apparent ignorance of the presence of Joanna Truscott in the mountains. Hardly likely in a man who knew everything else there was to know about Serafino. Still, an excellent performance with Marco keeping out of the way in the back room. You really couldn’t trust anyone in this affair, or so it seemed to me then.

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